First Anniversary Giveaway Day 2, with bento memories

2 Dec 2008 by maki

This is the second day of the week long giveaway party to celebrate the first anniversary of Just Bento, as well as the fifth anniversary of Just Hungry. (The first day of Just Bento’s part is here.) While over on Just Hungry I’m looking back at the first five years of the site, here I’d like to go even further back in time, and talk about some memorable bentos from my past. (If you want to skip ahead, today’s giveaway is at the bottom.)

Raw carrot flowers

My mother was always busy while I was growing up - she was often working, or had my younger sisters to worry about. Nevertheless she always made me an obento every day when I needed one. But sometimes, she’d forget to put in something.

I don’t know why I still remember this, but when I was 5 years old and in kindergarten, I opened my little pink bento box to find it full of rice topped with beautifully cut carrot flowers…and nothing else. I looked in my bag for another container, and found nothing. On top of that, the carrot flowers were raw! I still remember picking one up with my matching pink chopsticks, and the awful taste (to a 5 year old) of those hard carrot pieces. Soon I was crying, my heart full of despair. How could my mother do this to me? My kind kindergarten teacher took me aside, assessed the situation, and gave me some of her okazu (sides) to eat with my plain rice, which I ate while still sobbing.

My young mother had forgotten to put in the okazu, and hadn’t known that she was supposed to cook the carrot flowers! She’d seen a picture of them in a magazine without instructions, and in the busy household in a small town in Saitama prefecture where she’d grown up, they didn’t have time to cut carrots into fancy shapes.

A bento box full of gyoza

After my first year of kindergarten, the whole family moved to England and then the U.S. for several years. Once back in Japan, I had school lunch in elementary school, but once I got to middle school (junior high school) I needed bentos again. By this time my mother had a job, not to mention another child, but she still managed to make me an obento every morning. They weren’t fancy or pretty like those of some of my classmates, but they were always delicious. I still remember the bentos of my school years with a lot of fondness.

One day, I opened my very unfeminine no-nonsense aluminum bento box to find it full of plump gyoza dumplings. I think there were a dozen in there. They were lined on the bottom with…a raw cabbage leaf. There was nothing else — my mother had forgotten to pack the rice! My 14 year old self didn’t burst into tears, but did find it a bit strange. I traded a few of the dumplings with my friends for some of their rice, which worked out fine.

When I got home, I quizzed my mother about my gyoza-only bento. She admitted that she had indeed, forgotten the rice. Then I asked her about the raw cabbage leaf. She stared at me, and then at the nearly-empty bento box, and exclaimed, “but I thought it was lettuce!”

If you combine the two missing-parts bentos separated by 9 years, I think it makes a rather decent bento. But I did cook the carrot flowers!

Even if you are as busy as my mom was, you can still make your kids’, or your own, bento lunches pretty with the items in today’s giveaway. Maybe your kids will remember the bento lunches you make for them when they are adults, and embarass you with old stories too!

Shinzi Katoh’s Ringo (Apple) bento accessories are too cute for words, and the Kyarappa (Charappa) food cutter set will have you making kawaii onigiri with eyes and limbs in no time.

You’ll get 2 furikake shakers (you could use them as salt/peppers too), 2 sets of sauce containers, a set of tiny food containers, and the Kyarappa cutter set of 3, which comes with a recipe pamphlet in Japanese.

Please note that the Ringo accessories are not dishwasher safe. They should be washed carefully, since the faces can get rubbed off (as with many Shinzi Katoh bento accessories). The Kyarappa cutter package recommends handwashing too.

DEADLINE: Your comment/entry must be posted before Midnight Greenwich Mean Time on Friday, December 5th.

This giveaway is now closed. Thanks for entering, and check the front page for the giveaways that are still open! The winner will be announced next week!
Good luck!

Your stories are so funny and remind me of Ruth Reichel’s ‘Tender at the Bone’! (Which I am sure, beyond doubt, that you must have read). How is it that with a parent so indifferent to food, a child can grow up with such a fascination and knowledge?

I also grew up in the us. My mom was always busy being a single mom with four kids. We often just got money to spend at the school cafeteria. I think bento’s are way better and hope when i have kids to be able to make them bentos.

Great memories of your not so great lunches as a child. I would love to win the bento making stuff as I can’t seem to find anything in my town, and would love to make more creative lunches for myself and my kids.

thanks for putting up simple ways of making food look good, taste good and most importantly are healthy too. your timeline, the simplicity, and the calorie counts! which just adds on to why just bento is my favourite food blog, definitely makes life easier for the ‘elaborate dishes’-illiterate people like me!

I love your site and your bentos! The food is always delicious and inspires me to make bentos more often. Those two stories are so touching and heart warming! And i just love flower shaped veggies of any kind! That giveaway set is just darling!! Anything kawaii and appley goodness is right up my alley :) Keep making great bentos!!

I love reading your memories and I have to say, we all have those ones that are not so “wonderful” but we remember them all the same and they make us who we are. Thank you for sharing that part of you with all of us!!

I hope when my kids look at the lunch I hav made them, they think.. “My mom is so cool for making me cute food” LOL

I can totally relate to your story. My family was on a pretty tight budget when I was a kid and my mom used to bake a lot of our bread. Occasionally she would swirl together white and wheat bread so that each individual slice had a pinwheel look to it. I was so embarrassed of those sandwiches. The popular girls in class always had peanut butter and jelly on perfect, snowy white, smooth and spongy slices of Wonder bread. Not this rustic homemade bread with its homemade fillingsl

I hindsight I cringe when I think about it. How lucky would I feel now, decades later, to find that someone had packed me a homemade chicken salad sandwich on homemade pinwheel bread? Little did my 7 year old self understand the goodness and love that went into those lunches packed by my mother.

I’ve been hunting high and low for these accesories here in my country! But unfortunately it doesn’t seem like the kawaii bento trend has caught on here. =( I can’t imagine the variety of bento accesories/equipment that are available in Japan!